Works
- The Ownership of Enterprise, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996
- Ownership and organizational form, In Robert Gibbons and John Roberts (eds.), The Handbook of Organizational Economics, Princeton University Press, 891 to 917, 2013
In Organizational Structures
Known for
The Ownership of Enterprise
Ideas
The costs of ownership. Firms are typically owned by one class of patrons, chosen by the tradeoff between contracting costs and ownership costs, and collective decision making grows costly as owners' interests diverge. Caveat: A theory; Hansmann notes the lack of systematic evidence on how ownership falls off with the number of heterogeneous owners.